TheIntercept | Jeremy Scahill: Ralph Nader, welcome to this extended episode of Intercepted.
Ralph Nader: Thank you, Jeremy.
JS: Let’s start with Gina Haspel. This campaign that
the CIA is publicly waging to support her nomination, leaking or
publicizing memos that seem to exonerate her of any direct role in the
destruction of torture tapes. First question is just: Have you ever seen
anything like the CIA social media campaign that’s being waged right
now in an effort to get Gina Haspel confirmed as CIA director?
RN: No, and the reason why, one is that the CIA
desperately wants someone from their own ranks, they don’t want an
outsider. They’ve been battered at times by Trump and others, which is
pretty unheard of for a president to do that. So they’re hunkering down,
and they don’t want to lose this one.
JS: Right, but, at the same time, isn’t the CIA
supposed to be prohibited from engaging in domestic propaganda? I mean,
it does seem like they’re utilizing their social media platforms to
campaign for someone that there’s very serious questions about her role
in torture, black sites and other issues.
RN: Well, who has ever found a boundary for the CIA?
I mean they’re not supposed to deal with overt armed action abroad,
according to their original charter, they’re just supposed to collect
intelligence, and we know where that’s gone — that’s out of the window.
The CIA does what it wants, under the cloak of secrecy and national
security, does whatever it wants, and who’s going to stop it? It has so
many feelers all over the country and the world, and they really want
her in because they think that Trump is perfectly capable of nominating
an outsider who would give them a lot of trouble. And they’ve been
jolted more than usual, publicly, as an agency, and they want stability,
as they define it. And it doesn’t matter what she did in Asia in terms
of the Thailand episode and torture. I mean, that’s what they do. That’s
what the CIA does all over the world.
JS: You know it’s interesting, as I watch Trump
supporters who are railing against the deep state and saying that, you
know, you have all of these powerful people within the CIA/NSA/FBI
bureaucracy that are plotting against Trump, the thing that comes to my
mind is that if I were a really dark character within the CIA, right
now, I’d be very content with Trump being the commander-in-chief because
he doesn’t seem to understand the full range of powers that the CIA
has. And it seems to me like they’re able to do basically whatever they
want right now without much questioning from the White House.
RN: Well that’s been true of prior presidents. They
want deniability. They don’t really want to know what the NSA and CIA
do. President Obama, President Bush, President Clinton — they don’t want
to know that the NSA was dragnet snooping on virtually all Americans, a
clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, as well as the FISA Act.
And President Trump is no different in that way. What they are really
upset about is: When was the last time we ever heard a president attack
“the deep state”? He’s not attacking some rogue outfit in Afghanistan
that’s an offshoot and maybe under contract. He’s attacking the military
industrial complex’s core secrecy operations and that is freaking out
people at the CIA, especially career people who have never been fingered
that way from the White House. That’s why they want the stability of
this present nominee.
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